Pepsi For A Rape Opportunity

Well there it is, Pepsi’s latest ad campaign. What exec looked at this and thought gee what a great idea, trading a Pepsi for the opportunity to rape an unconscious woman.

When I first came across this via theF WORD, something in me felt so incredibly sad. It is not because I have a connection to Pepsi, in fact I don’t even drink the stuff. The daily ugliness that women are subjected to is beyond appalling. It’s bad enough that in real life women are beaten, raped, verbally abused and murdered without seeing advertising like this that normalizes this behaviour.

I am constantly reading descriptions of feminists as angry women, but when daily things like this are seen as just the cost of doing business, how can anger not be a legitimate result? This woman is as psychically different from me as night and day and yet due to patriarchy we are subject to the same fate; a life concerned about the impacts of male violence and aggression.

Ads like this say that women’s lives aren’t worth anything. Clearly she is need of aid and yet the men are so busy negotiating an opportunity to abuse her, this is over looked. This is not some cheap fantasy, it happens everyday and to use the pain that this kind of abuse causes as a marketing tactic signals that Pepsi is a company without any compassion.

Clearly they never thought of the effect that this would have on innocent women who have been victims of sexual assault coming across this advertisement. Obviously the execs believe that to women, rape and violence are part of our lives; and therefore we should embrace it. We may all be under the threat of rape, but that does not mean that we support patriarchy in perpetuating what it believes is its right to women’s bodies. This kind of campaigning needs to stop.

I am sickened and heartbroken to see this today. If anyone has any contact information for Pepsi please leave it in the comment section. They need to be made aware that a woman’s life is worth something. Violence against us is not a laughing matter, it is painful and real.